Reading Time: 7 minutes

For all these activities: Setup matters.

For the first few sessions of my class, I did not share my session plan with the students. Instead, we moved together from topic to topic, and I introduced the next topic right before we started talking about it.

Students had an easier time staying grounded in class, though, if they knew the plan for the session and could gauge our progress against it.

Here’s where that gets tricky: I did not always know exactly what we’d be able to cover. What if a portion took a lot more time, or a lot less time, than I expected? What if I needed to stop and answer questions for a while? What if one of the exercises proved particularly confusing? Those things can happen in any classroom, and longer sessions are particularly susceptible. Plus, this was my first time teaching this material. I could easily misjudge how long things would take.

So I had built flexibility into my plan by labeling parts of the lecture with a priority of 1 (essential) or 2 (not essential). If we hadn’t reached some predetermined point in the material by the time a break came up for the class, I’d remove a section with a priority of 2 to make sure we still finished on time.

Once I started sharing the plan with the class, adjusting on the fly meant doing things differently than I had said I would do them.

This didn’t happen to me often enough to become a huge issue, but honestly that might have been luck. If you’d like to try a strategy like this but you’re worried about mismatches between the outline and what you actually teach, there is a backup strategy that my students also found helpful:

Go from topic to topic during the session itself, then provide a summary at the end of class of what you’ve covered, and what (in general) you’re likely to do in the next session.

Resources that inform the way I teach

I knew that I wanted to commit to teaching as well as I could, so looked to folks I admire for examples. I re-read pieces of some of my favorite programming books to think about what made the author’s presentation of the topic so interesting or memorable. Big examples here: Working Effectively with Legacy Code, A Common Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms, Machine Learning Refined. 

I also turned to other people when I had questions or struggles during my teaching.  First, I spoke several times with the academic director of the computer science program. His experience teaching students in general, and computer science specifically, enabled him to make practical, valuable suggestions when I was stuck. He also managed to anticipate (and allay, somewhat) my concerns about issues that were bound to come up in the course of teaching.

Second, I corresponded with a friend of mine who has been a women’s counselor for fifty years and a middle and high school history teacher for decades. He argues that the fundamentals of good teaching and good storytelling are the same. His advice to “present important material like a mystery, and engage the students in helping you solve it” directly influenced my design for the code labs, which were pretty popular in class.

Third, I chatted with another friend of mine who is a professional magician. At some point I’d like to do a whole post on the way stage magic can inform teaching and presenting, but for now, I’ll keep that secret for you :).

I also perused a few books that specifically covered how to teach. One of those books fundamentally changed my approach in the classroom: Chris Emdin’s book, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood. Here’s a more detailed post on the value that this book brought to m teaching. For now, I’ll say that I recommend giving this book a read regardless of who you are or who you teach.

Conclusion

Throughout the classroom sessions, I found it helpful to switch between a variety of activities to keep folks engaged. The students appreciated having a session outline to track these activities—even though that meant that they would notice if I changed the plan on the fly. They also appreciated having a summary at the end, so if changing things is a big worry, I think a teacher could do just the summary at the end and still see some benefit.

A lot of my teaching principles enjoy the direct influence of other people who know a whole lot more about teaching than I do. I tried to follow the examples in some of my favorite programming books in the way I explained technical topics. Several mentors made excellent suggestions that helped me navigate the ups and downs of teaching my first course, too. Finally, I took a lot of wisdom from books that specifically cover the topic of teaching.

Were I to recommend just one of these books, I’d recommend For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood (and the rest of y’all, too) by Chris Emdin. You can tell from the title that the book aims to inform a specific subset of teachers, but I think this book is worth a read regardless of who you are or who you teach. The changes I made as a result of reading this book shaped me into a better steward of learning for almost any audience.

If you liked this post, you might also like:

Reducing job interview anxiety (for when you put yourself out there for that teaching gig!)

This talk on giving and receiving feedback (A 13 minute distillation of a whole post series, just for you)

Principles of feature engineering (zero relation to the teaching topic, but this series was fun to write, and hopefully both useful to data scientists and illuminating for the data science-adjacent)